HEATHER
BythetimeClairearrives in Edinburgh to do some emergency repairs in her rental flat, Heather has completed an audit for a haulage firm, gone on two light-hearted and non-committal dates with Gerry, and spent her evenings reviewing her manifestation diagram. She has transcribed her musings from St Andrews onto a large white board she normally keeps in her office. Today, she’s lugged it halfway across town to show it to Claire in the gaps between the flat upgrade.
‘So what do you think?’
She and Claire are sitting in the compact lounge of a tenement building where the ceiling is higher than the width of the roomwhilst the gas engineer works through the annual boiler check in the kitchen.
Claire puts down her coffee cup and pulls the whiteboard towards her. ‘So talk me through it,’ she says.
Heather leans over and points to the top left-hand corner.
‘So for my physical activity and improving my social life, I’ve started swimming.’
‘Swimming?’ Claire will be thinking of the effects of chlorine on menopausal hair.
‘I wear a cap.’
‘Geez. I bet that’s attractive,’ her friend joshes.
‘It’s like I’m wearing a black extra tight condom on my head, to be fair,’ Heather laughs, ‘anyway, I’m building up my stamina in the swimming pool because eventually I want to take up open water swimming.’
Claire taps Heather on the shoulder.
‘Good for you. Awesome.’
‘When I saw the swimmers in St Andrews on drop off day, I thought it looked like a cool thing to do. There’s a club that swims out of Portobello, just on the other side of town, so swimming with them, and perhaps even alone, is my eventual target if I’m ever brave enough.’
‘That’s it. That’s it,’ Claire says excitedly. ‘That’s the beauty of manifestation. You envisage your goal, and then allow your mind and the universe to construct small stepping-stones towards achieving that point.’
A knock on the door breaks up their conversation. Claire pays the heating engineer and files the gas safety certificate in her workbag.
‘Right, you,’ she says. ‘Painting.’
With the room vacated, Heather and Claire set to work brightening the small galley kitchen with fresh paint.
‘Uuug, it reminds me of home,’ Claire says as she daubs paint on the walls. ‘Every one of our walls is magnolia. I know Mark’s right. It is the most affordable. But it's just so booooring.’
‘Perfect for a rental property, though,’ Heather says from the step ladder, noting that her friend seems to be being increasingly down on her marriage these days.
They paint in companionable silence for a while, speaking only to negotiate the passing of a paint brush, the positioning of the ladders or the glossing of the skirting boards.
‘I hate my job,’ Heather says. It’s as though the meditative effects of the painting have loosened an awareness in her that was lying dormant. ‘I’ve put it in my plan. I only got into finance when Dougie left. There’s no way a teacher’s salary would have allowed Georgia and I to stay in our house. It was the only way I could gain financial independence. It’s been a career. It’s paid the bills. It’s never enthralled me.’
‘Maybe there can be some flex now Georgia’s at university?’ Claire says, bending her neck at an awkward angle to reach the area of wall obscured by the wall cabinet. ‘Might now be the time to consider returning to an art-based career and the work you love?’
Heather plops her own paintbrush into the pot and stretches her back.
‘Exactly,’ she says. ‘But what?’
They return to Heather’s manifestation board when the first coat of paint is drying. Their conversations whilst painting covered almost every aspect of Heather’s plan. With one notable exception which Claire realises when she stares once more at the whiteboard.
‘There are two men on this board,’ she says, her eyebrows squashed together in a comic furrow.
‘Indeed,’ Heather replies. ‘I hide it any time Gerry visits, obviously.’
Claire smirks.
‘I can see why.’ Because both Gerry and Scott feature on the board (Gerry: get to know better. Nice man. Might find a spark if I look? Scott: avoid. Emotionally unavailable, unreliable.)‘At least you’re resolving to keep your distance from Scott,’ her friend concedes.
